New Study: Antidepressants as Vaccine Adjuvants?

Adjuvants are, by definition, toxic. That’s why they’re used in vaccines. They create an immune response that also reacts to the vaccine’s antigen. Now, a study has documented that SSRI antidepressants have the same effect, thus demonstrating that SSRIs are toxic.

The typical approach to vaccines assumes that they work on everyone in the same manner. That is, of course, the only way mass vaccine programs can be justified. The reality, though, is that just as people are individuals, they react to vaccines as individuals. Now, a study shows that people who are depressed don’t respond as well to the shingles vaccine.

There’s a bit of humor in this. What this study unintentionally documents is that it’s the health status of a person that determines whether someone will become ill or how ill a person will become. That’s what those in the alternative medicine world have been saying all along!

Shingles is a second go-round of chicken pox. The virus hides in the nervous system and, usually during times of stress, it moves out along the nerve root where it’s been lodged, creating a rash and usually significant pain in the area served by that nerve system. Most people who suffer such an outbreak never succumb again—and most people never fall victim to shingles.

Interestingly, the authors did find that it’s not alleviation of depression that factors into the efficacy of the shingles vaccines. It made no difference whether the antidepressant had any benefit in the depressed person. The antidepressant drugs themselves are acting as a vaccine adjuvant. That should tell us something significant about these drugs:

Adjuvants are, by definition, toxic. It’s their toxicity that increases a vaccine’s efficacy. Therefore, the lesson that needs to be taken from this study is that antidepressants are, by definition, highly toxic.

The Shingles Vaccine

There’s a significant difference between the shingles and chicken pox vaccines. Like virtually all others, the chicken pox vaccine causes the body to create antibodies to the chicken pox virus. Thie antibody protection is referred to as the humoral system. Antibodies are the memory of previous infections. They remain aware of a characteristic of of the invading infectious agent and trigger the immune system to destroy any duplicate invaders that are cheeky enough to have a go.

The other type of immune system protection is called cell-mediated. It’s illustrated in the brief video to the right.

Cell-mediated immunity involves killer T-cells, which recognize many invaders without seeing them first. When they recognize invaders, they do as their name indicates, kills them. Next, they activate other killer T-cells and macrophages to join the battle. Then, they stimulate cells to to secrete cytokines, which further help battle the invaders. The cell-mediated immune response exists without previously being triggered by an infection.

The shingles vaccine is unique because it triggers the cell-mediated immune response.

The Study

The study, published in the journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases, used 40 subjects diagnosed with major depressive disorder who were given SSRI antidepresants. They were matched with 52 age and sex matched controls who had never received mental illness or depression diagnoses. The trial was double-blnded. Their varicella zoster virus cell-mediated immunity (VZV-CMI) levels were measured before being vaccinated, and again at 6 weeks, 1 year, and 2 years after vaccination.

Subjects diagnosed with depression and not treated with antidepressants were found to have lower levels of VZV-CMI than the nondepressed controls. Those who were treated with antidepressants had higher levels of VZV-CMI than those who took antidepressants. It made no difference whether the drugs had any effect on their subjective levels of depression.

The study’s conclusion was that treating depressed people with antidepressants probably improves the efficacy of the shingles vaccine. They seem to imply that artificially improving someone’s mood is beneficial, but that is not what they demonstrated.

What they showed is that giving an SSRI drug improves the cell-mediated immune response to the shingles virus. Their results showed that it made no difference whether the patients’ mood was helped. Therefore, they did not demonstrate that an improvement in a depressive state does one bit of good in increasing the vaccine’s results.

Instead, what they demonstrated was that a chemical change in the body, which may have nothing to do with mood, has a toxic effect like an adjuvant. Since adjuvants are, by definition, toxic agents that increase the effectiveness of vaccines, then they’ve actually demonstrated that antidepressants are toxic.

The question is, what do they plan to do with this information? They’re already talking about using antidepressants to boost the effectiveness of other vaccines. Are they going to start giving people antidepressant before vaccinations?

Frankly, I would put nothing past the vaccinators—especially when they’re the same corporations that sell antidepressants. Since the sales of antidepressants would soar, you can expect to see these highly toxic, brain damaging drugs prescribed to more and more people. They’ll tell people it’s for their health … but the real reason has nothing to do with health. It’s about profits. Of course.